Congress Healthcare reform

The healthcare reform impasse is a distraction. Whether you are for free market or single payer the status quo is designed to keep you locked in the maze where promises of winning at all costs or fixing the broken system is the cheese that everyone is chasing after. Over the past 8 years there has

When the system is overwhelmed and breaks, as it was intended, the end result will be a complete takeover of the healthcare system by the government as single payer, socialized medicine. There will also be another enormous change in our country. There will be a transfer of wealth, not from the rich to the poor, but instead from the middle class making them dependent on the government.

The meme of Medicare as the template for universal healthcare as the direction which the country should move because it will provide better, more comprehensive and cheaper healthcare is not true. Welcome to the world of Obamacare were centralized planning applied to medicine places the good of the collective over the rights of the individual who is deemed to be too ignorant to make his or her own healthcare decisions. In short, the answer to healthcare is not more government intervention…it is less.

Now that the Supreme Court has upheld The Affordable Care Act the final piece of the puzzle is in place. We will begin the inevitable slide to the end of patient driven healthcare – individualized medicine led by independent doctors in consultation with their patients. The healthcare system is broken, but The Affordable Care Act is not the solution. Instead of depending on Congress and waiting for an election to bring change, it is up both doctors and patients to work together to take back our power.

Obamacare was sold to Americans using smoke and mirrors. We only need to look at what has happened in Massachusetts to see the future: their costs of healthcare have risen; despite mandates people game the system carrying coverage when they are ill while dropping it when they recover (getting far more out of the system then they are putting in); the waiting time to see doctors is longer; and because the system is losing money, reimbursement to providers and hospitals will drop Obamacare sets up a system that is a transfer of wealth from the 99% - this is not change that Americans should stand for. It can only be reversed if doctors and patients stop playing the game and move to a free market system that removes the corporate and government middle men. This can be accomplished by both patients and doctors re-entering a fee for service system based on pricing transparency, and movement by patients to catastrophic coverage.

The Democrats and the Republicans have done a masterful job of demonizing the physician. The doctor has been the scapegoat for skyrocketing health care costs while giving more power over the medical industry to those entities that have been the architects of the broken healthcare system that we have today. In short, the system is a complex network of corporate middlemen, that have worked tirelessly figuring out ways to skim profits while simultaneously shifting the costs to patients, rationing their care in the form of pre-certifications, increasing premiums, and outright denials on one hand while decreasing physician reimbursements (in the form of bundling), lowering fees, implementing recovery audits to claw back reimbursements, and outright denials of payment after services are rendered on the other. The government has put rules and regulations into place that encourage and reward this behavior, while ensuring that doctors and patients continue to feed a beast that needs increasingly more money to run a system that is based on the management of chronic disease instead of true prevention. It is no wonder that we are spending more money on healthcare and are on more medication, yet we as society are getting sicker.

After months of denial that healthcare reform would involve rationing of healthcare for those who are the most vulnerable, the senior citizens who depend on Medicare, the President has come up with a proposal to decrease healthcare costs and guess what….it’s rationing.
Under Obamacare, a 15 member panel known as the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) was created to ‘oversee healthcare costs’. This panel consists of individuals appointed by the President and confirmed by Congress - two ingredients that make it highly unlikely that they would be truly independent. In addition, there is no mandate that members be practicing physicians which is a recipe for cuts that are highly likely to affect the delivery of quality individualized patient care.

I had high hopes after the fall elections that things would change. I expected once the Republicans took power that they would make a concerted effort to reverse the downslide of our health care system into the hole that is created by Obamacare. Apparently, it is just business as usual on Capitol Hill… big surprise. The Republicans failure to act will have a devastating effect on a physician's ability to deliver quality individulaized health care.

It has become clear that health care reform in its present state has nothing to do with delivering quality healthcare to the American people.
The idea of universal coverage, with protection against insurance company wrongs (e.g., denying patients for pre-existing conditions and limiting the insurance company’s ability to deny coverage when you really need it) has been the sheep’s clothing cloaking a bill designed to destroy our healthcare system. In short, the proposed healthcare reform will doom us to a future that has the potential to make us sicker by limiting our access to screening exams such as mammograms, and limiting our access to physicians while making us pay more for the privilege.
The vote in Massachusetts was a stand against those in the government who are bent on telling us that they know what is best for us. I have been astounded by the complete contempt in which those in power hold the American people. A majority of the people in this country think the healthcare reform effort is going in the wrong direction. Although the vote in Massachusetts made it clear that there was major opposition to the current bill, I have doubts that the voices of the majority will be heard and this debacle will be stopped.